by A. R. Knight
And land in a burning, milky mess. I hit, and my back explodes into bruising pain, but I’m cushioned, as if hitting a heavy mass of water. Then I bounce off, rolling onto the hard street amid fiery ash and flickering flames, the end state of Kolas’ bombardment. Malo’s beside me, and I dive on him immediately, brushing away burning flakes from his skin. He doesn’t have a mask, has no protection.
Only when I’ve cleared the warrior do I look around at the cascading clumps of people and platforms falling around us. The glance provides the reason I’m alive - the platforms, when they hit the ground after the fall, lose their form, becoming instead soft, blob-like pillows. The cushion is wide enough to keep most from landing on each other, though the clumps of prisoners aren’t so lucky. Most are rolling on the ground, or lying still.
“You survived,” Viera says as she limps over towards Malo and I.
“One of the few, apparently,” I say, looking past the Lunare.
Both of the Oratus look fine, as if the large drop was nothing more than a normal jump for them. Which, maybe it is. The first few Sevora guards seem all right too, standing clumped to the side, though their furry faces are tight with pain.
“Guess our rescue isn’t going so well,” Viera joins me in the survey.
“We gave them a chance,” T’Oli states. “It’s better than they had.”
The Ooblot’s not wrong, and I’m not going to ruin what little chance the rest of us have by waiting in the avenue.
“Let’s go!” I shout, getting the attention of those able to hear me. “We don’t have much time!” I help Malo up from the ground, notice the warrior’s breathing hard. “Come on, Malo. It’s just another day for us, right?”
“Just another day,” the warrior echoes, giving me a slight smile. “I missed you, Kaishi.”
I toss him a scratched, exhausted smile back. “Missed you too.”
The wreckage around us makes for a bad spot to share a moment, though, as aside from the soft platforms, the intersection that’s become our landing spot is full of the burning casualties from Kolas’ bombardment. Looming over and around us are further remnants of the transport tube and the bare lattices of buildings with the glass blown or melted out of their windows.
The sky, I notice, is getting ever more orange, and while I can’t see the moon from where I stand, my guess is that our time is getting close to being out.
Those still alive and able form a shambling group walking beneath the tube transport and towards the great sphere. Before, on my first trip to Vimelia, most of the streets were deserted, with the crowds choosing to cluster in transport tubes or ships shuttling around the surface. Walking isn’t efficient enough for the Sevora, apparently. Now, though, with all normalcy blown to shreds, panicking Sevora join our motley assortment of recovering wounded, Sevora guards, humans and Oratus. Many, with their hosts, take one glance at Lan and Gar and assume we’re a raiding party and run the other way - screaming out warnings to the wind. Others hope that the Vincere won’t fire on their own and trust their lives to our band, joining as stragglers behind, where Gar keeps a toothy eye on them.
“Have to say, this is like a dream coming true,” T’Oli says as we walk down the devastated street. “I’ve wanted to see Vimelia burn for a long time.”
“With you still on it?”
“Can’t let perfect get in the way of good, Kaishi.”
“The Ooblot’s losing it,” Viera says behind me. “Surprised a living puddle kept it together this long, really.”
“I’m far saner than any human,” T’Oli replies.
“You’re both crazy as far as I’m concerned,” I say, ducking beneath a broad metal beam that’s fallen, crossing the entire street from one side to the next.
I want to move faster, but forcing the Sevora into a run would mean abandoning the prisoners, and someone would have to carry Malo. Glances at the moon when ruins allow seem to show our doom progressing slow, but then, I’ve never seen a planetary annihilation before.
“Malo, what’d they do to you?” Viera asks our rescued warrior friend.
“Everything, and nothing,” Malo replies. “Little food, a lot of questions. Attempts to infect me.”
“Did it work?”
Malo does some combination of a laugh and a cough. “I’m here, but every time they failed, they tried again. Until the Vincere came.”
I clench my hands. I remember that - when the familiars on the space station Cobalt sucked the Sevora out of my head, then let it back in after I’d taken a good long look. To say that experience was unpleasant would be underselling it. To say I’d had more nightmares than I can count...
“We’re here,” one of the Sevora guards announces, and I look up enough to realize that yes, we’re nearly at the foot of the sphere.
This close, it’s larger than I thought, and appears to be covered in row after row of dark slats that shimmer in the daylight. At the ground level, the circle curve melds into the landscape like a mountain, a smooth transition to a patchwork stone pattern beneath. Poles adorned with banners showing Nasiya and its Oratus host stand in the courtyard, though most are at some degree of bent and burned by this point, even if the sphere itself looks untouched.
As we watch, another bolt from above strikes the sphere and sparks the shield, the slight blue wave cascading around the structure and fizzling away to nothing.
“Does the front door work?” Viera asks, gesturing with her miner towards a line of ground-level slats angled vertical instead of to the side.
Each one of these has a peppered line of green lights around the outside. It seems friendly enough, but when none of the Sevora guards respond to Viera’s question, I repeat it.
“We don’t know,” the one that’s been talking, with its red and brown Flaum fur singed from the crash, responds. “Nasiya and its faction have never been our friends, we’ve never been here.”
“You’re invited now,” Viera says. “Get to it.”
I nod, seconding the command. The guards glance at each other, hesitating, until Viera raises up her miners at all of them. Lan seconds the threat with a hiss.
If Nasiya’s base has some sort of defense, better to have the Sevora trigger it than one of us.
But there’s no explosion, no scattering of Sevora and Flaum parts as the quintet approach the slats. Rather, when they get close, those green lights flash and all of the slats slide to the side, open and free.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Viera says next to me.
“We still might need them,” I reply.
“They said they’ve never been inside,” T’Oli interjects. “Their usefulness to the mission is likely minimal at this point. It would be safer to eliminate them.”
All five of the guards have their backs turned towards us, at least until their lead looks around to see if we’re coming. I’m standing with Viera and Malo to my left, Lan to my right, a couple dozen random prisoners, Gar and his trail of Sevora hangers-on. Viera could burn down all five guards, I have no doubt.
“Not yet,” I say. “We can still use them as bait.”
Why am I keeping the Sevora alive? Maybe it’s because we’re surrounded by so much death that I can’t bring myself to order more right now. Maybe it’s because these five are probably going to die later, anyway, by Lan’s claws.
And if I wait until then, I won’t be responsible.
“Whatever you say, Empress.” Viera lowers her miners. “Guess that means we’re going in?”
“Yes,” I reply. “Weapons ready. We have no idea what’s going on inside.”
When we go through the slats, though, it’s clear that we’ve missed the main event. Nasiya’s headquarters opens with a monstrous lobby that rises taller than our Tiers at home, higher than the tube transport. It’s full of color too - though these murals don’t shift and are, rather than scattered paints, picture-perfect images of various planets. The lobby itself arranges like a miniature version of the building its inside of - curved walls con
clude in an arched ceiling, from which those images hang like banners.
Along the walls, too, flow glass-sealed rivers of the ink-purple liquid I remember well from the very first night I found the Sevora crashed into my jungle home. The rivers are spaced and come together into pools on either side of the silver center, a space that might be beautiful if not for all the bodies.
Every species I can name is represented among the casualties, from the charred, colored sludge of Whelks to the broken carapaces of Teven. Flaum fur is plentiful, and some bits of the stuff still burn.
“This was a big fight,” T’Oli says.
I wait for Viera’s cutting remark, but for once she doesn’t say anything as we walk through the graveyard. Even the Lunare is silenced by the sight.
“One I’m glad we missed,” I say finally, then turn to Lan. “Where do you think Nasiya’s keeping its ship?”
“At the very top,” Lan hisses. “Where Nasiya itself spends the most time.”
The idea makes sense - keep the escape where you’re going to be.
“There’s a lift back here,” says Viera, who’s kept walking as I talk to the Oratus. “Going to be a tight fit for everyone though.”
“Then we send the most important first,” Lan says to me, and I know what she’s suggesting.
This is the point we ditch away the riders, the leeches and the Sevora. I look over at the prisoners. The ones that’ve made it this far seem to only have eyes for the corpses, and I’m sure they’re imaging themselves in that role.
“Then we send the lift back down,” I say. “For the rest of them.”
Lan nods, and in another few seconds we’ve assembled the star strike team; Malo, Viera, myself and T’Oli, and the two Oratus. Nobody questions the arrangement, because we’re the only ones with weapons.
Viera’s right; the lift isn’t meant for a bunch of Oratus, but we solve the puzzle and manage to squeeze everyone onto the platform, the same white material and tube as the rest of Vimelia. As we’re getting in, another quake rattles the ground, this one longer and deeper than the others, prompting a few sharp squeals from the huddled prisoners in the lobby.
“Better hope they built this place well,” Viera says.
“It’s the strongest building on the planet,” T’Oli replies. “Clarity’s Dawn tried to crack it many times, even tried using explosives around the base. Nothing, and we lost some good souls on that one.”
We might lose some good souls on this one too, but the platform isn’t going to be where that happens. After we’re all on - Malo adopts a truly weary pose, crumpling down onto the platform’s floor - T’Oli and I set the destination on the lift’s panel. All the way to the top.
“What do you think those guards will do now that we’re gone?” Viera asks as the lift starts its ascent. “Take those species prisoner again?”
“They don’t have weapons,” I reply. “What does it matter? Nothing here is going to last long anyway.”
“I hope they fight each other,” Gar hisses. “That would be a better way to die than by moonfall.”
“Moonfall?” I catch the word. “You have a term for this?”
“While this technology is new,” Lan hisses. “More gradual planetary destruction has been attempted. Conducting a moonfall can help break apart an icy world, add land to a smaller planet, or grant access to difficult minerals.”
I shake my head. Again, this galaxy is proving itself a place far beyond what I thought possible.
For now, though, the lift’s slowing and the panel’s beeping that we’re about to reach our destination, which means it’s time to see if this fight’s still happening, or if Nasiya’s already gone.
Which means we’re dead.
14 Sky Surfing
The true surprise comes later, after Sax and Bas have had their meals and accustomed themselves to Quell and how it works. There’s not a lot to the base, though Nobaa and Engee immediately find themselves fascinated with the terminals and the core lines that Quell have managed to tap into.
“So we have access to their logistics data?” Sax hears Nobaa exclaim at one point.
Sax isn’t so dour as to believe that such knowledge isn’t useful, but Evva’s Quell isn’t built to last through a long war of attrition. There’s not enough fighters here, for one, and, according to Evva, they only have a few other safe houses. Meaning, if the Chorus finds this base, the whole initiative is doomed before it ever really starts.
So when another skiff lowers its way into the base with a familiar Flaum piloting it, Sax feels the first real tug of hope he’s had since arriving on Aspicis.
Coorvin, with his ash-black fur looking better than Sax has ever seen it, gets off the skiff and is mobbed by a bevy of Quell members asking for information on this and that. Sax, though, turns to Plake with a different question.
“How’d you get him here?” Sax assumes the Vyphen’s responsible for it somehow, and Plake’s shrug confirms he’s not wrong.
“Wasn’t hard,” Plake says. “Coorvin has a reason to be here - he was on Cobalt when it blew up, and the Chorus wanted to talk to him about it. He’s also Flaum, which, if you haven’t noticed, is kind of a requirement to get onto this planet. So he reached out to the Vincere on Rathfall, said he’d been kidnapped and needed an extraction. They came and got him, brought him here.”
“And he escaped?”
“If they even tried to hold him,” Plake gives Sax a skeptical look. “You think you’d devote a lot of effort to keeping a Flaum jailed if there’s no evidence against him?”
Sax thinks he’d probably eviscerate the creature if there’s a chance it could do him harm, but that’s probably not appropriate to say, so he agrees with Plake.
Coorvin, though, makes the Chorus pay for their ignorance; while in the Meridia, the vast construct rising from the surface of Aspicis up into near-space above, the Flaum took careful notes of just how the Chorus keep their security running. It’s a spicy setup: plenty of guards, pass-codes and timed accesses, more the higher you go. To even get in the front entrance, they would have to get past an Amigga-only bio scanner.
With every observation of the Meridia’s impenetrable security, Sax sees the morale deflate among the people present. It’s one thing to believe in a cause when there’s a chance, a whole other thing to keep believing when failure’s a certainty.
Coorvin, though, keeps them hanging till the end, where he gives them a bit of hope: even though the lifts are staggered, so no one can shuttle all the way to the top, even though the security measures are vast, once inside the Meridia an insurgent force would be hard to take down. The key is getting into the tower’s base.
“The levels themselves are crowded, with easy points to defend,” Coorvin concludes. “You’ll have to find ways to work the lifts, but once you’re inside, you should be able to find ways to get up to higher levels. The hardest point is the entrance. You have to be an Amigga to get in, or with one. And unless something’s changed, we don’t have an Amigga on our side.”
“We don’t need one,” Engee pops in here. “Bio-scans can be defeated. If we can get access to the scanner, or to the control...”
Coorvin nods. “Thought of that too, but I couldn’t start asking questions about that without looking suspicious.”
“I can take a guess,” Evva says, her eyes ordering the rest of the Quell forces back to their work. “The Vincere has a protocol for sensitive securities, one I would guess the Chorus follows: never keep the control next to its target.”
Yes. Sax knows this one - it’s why every Vincere ship has its bridge as far away from its most vulnerable parts, the engines. It’s why the power source governing those same engines is housed in a different part of the ship, meant to force a strike team to traverse all across a cruiser before it can get full access to its systems.
“You think the control for the Meridia’s security systems lives outside of the Meridia itself?” Coorvin says.
“The Meridia is a giant target
for anyone looking to attack Aspicis.” Evva says. “The Chorus has the Vincere, the strongest military force in the galaxy on their side, which means any attack would have a short time to succeed. Would you take a chance that a single, focused raid could break your system and get to the top, just because you housed your own keys in the same place?”
“If the controls for the bio-scan are somewhere else,” Bas says. “Then where?”
“The place least likely to break!” Nobaa says. “Your vital systems ought to be where there’s the least chance they’ll get interrupted, and that means power.”
All eyes turn to the metal slat. Energy from the planet’s core: un-ceasing and un-interruptible.
The plan flows quickly from there; Nobaa and Engee take charge of designing a defeat program, one that should swap the bio-scan to see any species as the right one, not just Amigga. Sax and the others use Quell’s terminals to get a good idea of the target.
Cavignum: Aspicis’ largest power plant, the one closest to the Meridia. A massive thing that is, essentially, built around a giant hole bored deep into the planet. The construct saps the heat pouring out of Aspicis’ core and uses it to generate the energy that powers the Meridia, that charges up a quarter of the entire world.
For that reason, Cavignum is plenty well defended. The few images they can pull up make it clear there’s surface and air turrets, plenty of guards, and all the usual security measures like locked doors, sections that can be sealed off, and more. All of that gets coupled with the fact that moments after an attack starts, an endless stream of deadly reinforcements are only moments away.
Short of an orbital bomb, Sax isn’t sure how they’re going to get in. Especially when Nobaa and Engee say that they’ll need to get to the right terminal in the power station itself.
“It’s not as simple as just running the program,” Nobaa says. “We need to get access to the bio-scanning system. Literally get into how it operates and change what it does. That can’t be done remotely, not that we can see.”